I have more good news to report: I unlocked half-dragon! Here's how I did it!So first choice was a taurog zerker. Easy peasy!Now my second run, I tried an interesting experiment. I did vampire with platemail, usual potions and elite. And then I was like, you know, I don't really need extra gold, and I don't really need extra popcorn, lets see what patches does for the first time ever! And lucky for me, Patches is super neutered by vampire's natural immunities. Now granted, I still died to matron once because of a misclick, but it was relatively simple.My final run used the same sort of logic: take Patches, but use it on someone who won't be hurt by it. So I went with an Orc Crusader. This run was interesting as well because I ended up getting rid of Patches at level 3 so I could get a Martyr Wrap and an amulet of Yendor and some other items. But whatever, I now have a half dragon! Only one more class until I can go back to having an empty void in my life! Hooray!

The Crusader is actually hideously good at that dungeon - I went prepped Dragon Shield with Taurog -> EM -> Taurog -> Drac. Warmonger, one health potion off parched (could've been none if I'd been ready for it and hadn't cocked up the plant management). Also, somehow a plant spawned on the EM altar, which I swear shouldn't happen...

I think Tikki Rogue may work for a parched run if managed properly - I tried him and didn't make it (went GG since saw him early - hard to say if that or glyph under-use sunk the run for me).

I don't know about the vamp, but the crusader is just about the only guy who is reliably immune to curse. Since he's also immune to poison and mana burn this makes him a beter resist stacker in some way than the guys who stat out with resists. He can also lug patches around with no downsides except random "ur dead" teleports.

I'm not sure whether this was intended or not. The combination of "no relevant debufs" + "no downside patches" + "extra altar to mooch resists out of" makes him very single mindedly powerfull - but has no sinergy wih the first ability at all

And curse is really dependent on not being easily ignored, it's unique as a staus effect in that regard. Crusader makes fun of that concept.

The idea behind high health characters is good but I find they lack damage bad and in Vicious runs I run out of unexplored space. The potions get used up but I don't do much damage. Whereas having high dmg/not as ridiculously high health seems to go better. Is the trick in pumping up resists too?

If you are doing health stacking as your primary thing, you really need the Fireheart, which is the only health support item in the game. Refilling your resources between fights will be a huge problem even with the Fireheart, so you need to try and ding after two fights, maximum, every time. Resistances certainly help, but part of the appeal of extreme health stacking is that you can tank without needing resistances and can therefore ignore Curse.

Blovski posted a Dwarf Glowing Guardian Paladin strategy that works on Naga City and I was able to make it work on my first try. That being said, this is probably the upper limit of what you can do with a dedicated health stacker. I doubt this would work in Demonic Library.

Let's talk demonic library. Those bosses are beast. The problems I see are: no easy level catapult, limited space, are there less monsters? And a struggle to get to level 10 with some characters. So maximising resources seems vital, decent attack dmg - its hard burndarayzing down bosses with limited resources. What character combos are good?